adventures with liftweb

On the journey to create a JSF like scala framework, I’m currently in the process of studying how LiftWeb works. Obviously, the first step is to build something tangible and see what it does. A few observations to begin with:
1. Scala’s Eclipse support is not enough to provide a “create new liftweb project” option in Eclipse.

Instead, its a 2 step process:

Create a project using maven on the command line with:
mvn org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-archetype-plugin:1.0-alpha-7:create  \
-DarchetypeGroupId=net.liftweb                             \
-DarchetypeArtifactId=lift-archetype-basic                 \
-DarchetypeVersion=0.8                            \
-DremoteRepositories=http://scala-tools.org/repo-releases  \
-DgroupId=PROJECTNAME -DartifactId=PROJECTNAME

This generates a project outline,and to make it suitable for Eclipse, from the project folder, run the command:

mvn eclipse:eclipse

To set this project up in Eclipse, you do:
“Import -> General -> Existing Projects into workspace -> Project”

And this sets up a liftweb project in your Eclipse workspace. I havent yet figured out how to deploy the project into Glassfish directly, right now, to generate a war, from the project directory: mvn install

This install command generates a war in the “target” folder which I then deploy in glassfish using the admin console.

Again, because I havent figured out how to deploy into glassfish from Eclipse, I’m not sure how hot deploy works with Lift,but this blog assures us its possible.

Will keep posting updates as I continue my exploration of Lift Web.